


Hope Will Never Die

by cotton_prima



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hope, Really just a vent fic, what a concept!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 05:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26347846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cotton_prima/pseuds/cotton_prima
Summary: Hope will never die. It is not allowed to.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Hope Will Never Die

**Author's Note:**

> I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem Warriors, and every time Lucina says "I must become everyone's hope," I feel sad.

Nobody believes that the world will truly end. Not in their lifetime, at least. Which is why, when it happens, a stubborn part of Lucina rejects the reality of it. Her father cannot be dead. He simply can’t. She never sees his body, which is not recovered from Plegia. Only his sword returns to Ylisstol, along with a decimated army.

But Lucina has lived her entire life in the shadow of war, human and finite though they were. She is nothing if not decisive. She suspends her grief and rallies what is left of the army behind her aunt, the new exalt. When Lissa falls, she throws her efforts into defending Ylisstol. She cuts her way forward, the gleaming violence of her blade keeping the darkness at bay. But the losses keep coming. In short time everyone of her father’s generation, everyone she has looked up to, dies. This world, Naga tells her, is lost. Its destruction is not total, not yet, but inevitable.

So Lucina and her closest friends do what they can. They save themselves. In doing so, they hope they might save another future.

_They must hope for this. Otherwise what they have done is cowardice. They might have died fighting for their own world like everyone else. Or they might have lived on in desolation. The destruction was not total, after all. When they escaped, thousands of others were still clinging to life. When Lucina wakes in the middle of the night, the terrors of that world fresh in her mind, it is the living that haunt her._

She lives as the ghost of someone yet to be born. Someone who, if she is successful, will never become the person she is now. Being a ghost suits her well enough, so she dons the name of a dead hero and goes about her unfinished business.

The past is foreign as it is familiar. No smoke hangs over Ylisstol, and its streets do not carry the scent of death. There is a tenuous peace in the kingdom. Prosperity, even. Had the world ever been so gentle? Had her father and aunt really been so young?

She wishes she could enjoy it. Sometimes, she almost does. Then she remembers that _all of this hinges on her altering the course of history._ The realization crushes the air from her lungs each time. She can still hardly believe what has happened, even after being flung back through time. She is not strong enough to bear it. She does not have a choice. If she stops, if she allows despair to catch her for even a moment, Lucina will surely crumble. And all will be lost.

It is not enough for her to have hope. She must become it.

She prevents Emmeryn’s death at the hands of Plegian assassins. Her entire childhood she had heard stories of her aunt’s kindness and grace. Her tragic end, too. But Emmeryn is even more radiant than the portraits depicted her. When the danger has passed, it is difficult to leave the castle, and the family she could have had with it. But for the first time in years, Lucina feels powerful. It is like she has stolen something from fate itself.

Emmeryn dies anyhow. This time in Plegia’s castle courtyard, her death made a gruesome spectacle. She watches as Robin’s plan fails because of course it does. The pegasus knights drop out of the sky, the sound of their bodies hitting stone softer and more terrible than she expected. And yet, even when Emmeryn falls, Lucina cannot stop hoping that somehow, _somehow_ , it will turn out alright.

It doesn’t.

It is like being punched in the teeth.

Again, she is too late, too powerless to change anything. She had saved Emmeryn from death, and death had taken her anyway, even more violently. She had changed the past, and _it did not matter._

But that is not quite true, even though it felt like it was. It mattered, though not in the way Lucina had expected. Emmeryn’s sacrifice makes her a martyr to the people of Plegia. Soldiers lay down their arms in disgust. Peasants revolt. The country seems to strain against the Mad King, the tensions of an ineffectual rule finally reaching their tipping point. Thanks to this, the Ylissean army sweeps in with little resistance. The Mad King is slain, and the war is won in a fraction of the time it took in her world. Fewer casualties, too.

She tries to celebrate this, at least. To take the unintended victories for what they’re worth. But she cannot shake her sense of foreboding. _If she fails, this will not matter, either. Like Emmeryn, they are living on false time. Should Grima rise, they will die anyhow._

Her father ascends the throne. He marries her mother. Lucina watches the ceremonies from afar, her parents’ faces lost to distance. She imagines they look happy, imagines the smile on her mother’s face when her father leads her onto the balcony to introduce the people of Ylisse to their new queen. The thought sustains her.

She does not see them again for two years.

She almost doesn’t know what to do with herself during peacetime. But she cannot relax, not with the knowledge that a greater ruin is just beyond the horizon. She tries to keep tabs on the Grimleal, who she is sure are accumulating power. She tries, but her attempts to infiltrate their ranks are unsuccessful. They are a reclusive group, even more so after the war. And she is only one person.

_What an excuse. The Grimleal are not even god-dragons, but simply people. And if even they are too much for her, then what was the point of Naga saving her? What right does she have to wield Falchion if all she can do with it is fail?_

She returns to Ferox and picks up some mercenary work. It isn’t exactly honorable, but what other skills does she have to support herself? She is no longer the Khan’s champion, but she has earned something of a reputation. The work is steady enough. It is not what she came here to do.

Time feels longer than it should, even though she does not want the future to come. Lucina feels like she is wasting it. She should be doing more. She should be doing _something_. But she is just surviving.

Is that allowed?

_It shouldn’t be._

_What are you doing?_

_Why are you even here?_

She tamps these thoughts down to the very bottom of her. She cannot allow herself to think such things, even though _it feels good, doesn’t it? There is an awful peace in despair, in resignation. It is cruel to hope. Torture, even. Why fight the tide of fate? Why put herself through that, when even if she wins, oblivion is inevitable?_

Because.

_Because?_

It is not for herself only that she fights. If it were, she would have given up a long time ago. No, it is for others. Her family, her friends, the people she loved and will love. For people she will never meet and may even dislike if she did. For those who will be born long after she is dead, when her memory is lost to time. For the chance that their lives will play out, unremarkable or distinguished, joyful or tragic as they may be.

So Lucina continues, exhausted. Hope stuck in her like claws.

“You deserved better from me than one sword and a world of troubles.”

Back in her own world, beneath the Fell Dragon’s beating wings, she had seen a cliff drop suddenly into the sea. _The town atop it, too._ Tons of rock breaking easily as bread, and the water lurching up, its foam like long, white fingers. _Pulling all those lives under._

When the man who will be her father says this, Lucina feels the bottom of her give way. She had protected it for so long. Her face grows hot. Her throat tightens. How could she deserve anything more? Anything at all? She survived after all, which is more than can be said about him. More than can be said about the broken world she fled. She has to be stronger than this. She has to become everyone’s hope.

And still, the water lurches up.

She sobs, and for a moment she is a child again, crying into her father’s shirt. But Lucina is not a child, and she knows it is not safety when he puts his arms around her.

It feels like it, though.


End file.
